IMPORTANT NOTE:
UBC's endowments experienced a 20% value loss in 2008/09 due to the ongoing world financial crisis. The Board of Governors voted on February 5, 2009 to implement a plan as of April 1 to recoup the combined spending deficit and value loss over the next 10 years so that all funds will be back on a solid footing by 2019. This included a drop in the endowment spending rate from 5% to 3.5% of the three-year average market value.
The effect on the COSMOS International Graduate Travel Award for 2009/10 will be a reduction in the amount of the award to $1700.
The Fisheries Centre is pleased to announce an annual ~$5,000 (see above) travel award endowed by Dr. Daniel Pauly and The University of British Columbia for a deserving international graduate student who needs support for research/field work to be conducted in the student’s region or country of origin.
In adjudicating the award, first preference is given to students associated with the UBC Fisheries Centre, second preference to students in Resource Management and Environmental Studies, third preference to students in Zoology, and fourth preference to those in Forestry. The award is made on the recommendation of the UBC Fisheries Centre in consultation with the Faculty of Graduate Studies.
The Fisheries Centre will award a scholarship annually to the student making the best academic proposal for research/field work. The student will be expected to submit an article to the Fisheries Centre newsletter, FishBytes, describing the outcome of the research. Proposals should be no longer than 1000 words. Submit email proposal and full c.v to office@fisheries.ubc.ca . Proposal submission deadline is February 1 of each year (extended to Feb 15 for 2010 only).
The money will be paid as a lump sum by the Faculty of Graduate Studies. A budget is required in the proposal, and the money can be spent in any study-related fashion. The student is responsible for all tax implications.
Conditions of the award are:
1. The work must be completed by August 31 two years after the award was made.
2. The successful applicant provides as product a short paper for one of the Fisheries Centre’s research publications, with the intention to submit later to the peer-reviewed literature.
3. A shorter version should be submitted to the FishBytes newsletter in liaison with the editor.
4. Up to 4 suitable photos on the research trip, with informative captions, submitted to the Fisheries Centre web site photo gallery.
2008/ 2009 Winner:
Mr Tashi Tsering, PhD student in the UBC IRES Resource Management and Environmental Studies Program, has been awarded the third annual Cosmos International Graduate Travel Award, in the amount of $5,100 for the 2008/2009 academic year (2008 Winter Session).
Mr Tsering plans to use the award to help fund his field research in the spring of 2009 on climate change implications on agrarian society and water management in the arid Himalayas. Concerned about the interest of marginalized contemporaries such as subsistence farmers living in climate-sensitive regions, he is interested in exploring social and fairness issues of sustainabilty and climate change. His field site is the Spiti Valley in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, a high-altitude desert region where farmers are fully dependent on snow and glacial melt water for irrigation. This research aims to make two important contributions: to investigate how social and cultural practices in the region are sculpted by water resource availability, and to document indigenous perspectives on climate change.
Mr Tsering's research is supervised by Dr Tsering Shakya, UBC Institute of Asian Research.
2007/ 2008 Winner:
Ms Lydia Teh, PhD student in the IRES Resource Management and Environmental Studies Program, was awarded the second annual $5000 COSMOS International Graduate Travel Award, for the 2007/2008 academic year.
Ms Teh's PhD research project aims to develop a systematic zoning procedure for marine conservation and fisheries management that integrates human behavioural, socio-economic and ecological attributes across space that at the same time requires minimum investment in technology, labour, and data, such that it is readily accessible to data-poor and resource limited tropical fisheries in developing countries. A fuzzy logic and evaluation scoring approach will be applied to develop this zoning procedure, with output being an index which indicates the suitability of a site for inclusion in a managed or protected area.
Her field work was carried out in the Semporna Islands Group in south-eastern Sabah, Malaysia, over two months in 2008 to gather ecological and socioeconomic data for representation in fuzzy sets; and to investigate socio-ecological relationships that will help to formulate realistic heuristic rules governing human aspects of site selection. She conducted interviews with fishers to investigate their perceptions and knowledge of ecological and socio-economic dynamics in the reef fisheries, their spatial fishing patterns, and their responses and adaptation to real or perceived social, economic, and ecological changes in the reef fisheries. Interview responses will be analysed to form relationships between ‘attributes’ and ‘descriptors’ within the fuzzy model. Other field activities included creel surveys and rapid underwater assessment using ReefCheck technique to examine coral reef habitat status and validate fishers’ information.
2006/ 2007 Winner:
Ms Louise Teh, PhD student in the Resource Management and Environmental Studies Program, was awarded the first annual $5000 COSMOS International Graduate Travel Award, for the 2006/2007 academic year. She conducted an investigation of the discount rates of small-scale fishers in the Sulu-Sulawesi Marine ecoregion. Her research aims to address two main questions: 1) How does integrating the time preferences of fishers affect fisheries management strategies? 2) What ecological and socio-economic factors may influence the discount rates of fishers? She did two months of field research at Banggi and Semporna Islands, Sabah, Malaysia, conducting fisher surveys and monitoring fish landings. Ms Teh then intends to estimate individuals' discount rates and evaluate the cost of management from the fishers' perspectives. Finally, she will use GIS software to investigate what socio-economic, ecological and governance characteristics of the fisheries may affect discount rates.
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*In October 2005, the annual International Cosmos Prize was presented by the Expo'90 Foundation to Dr. Daniel Pauly, Professor and then Director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre.
UBC Award #6385: http://www.students.ubc.ca/finance/awards.cfm?page=search&session=2009W&campus=UBC%20&ID=6385